Surrender: The Call of the American West
In the style of Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Eula Biss, Surrender explores the changing landscape of the American West and the radical environmental movements that have taken root in response to the increasingly urgent climate crisis.
Blending personal memoir with insightful reportage and vivid nature writing, award-winning author and essayist Joanna Pocock investigates the changing landscape of the West and the radical environmental movements that have taken root in the Mountain States. She witnesses the annual tribal bison hunt near Yellowstone National Park, where she meets a scavenger community honing ancestral skills. She joins Finisia Medrano, a transgender rewilder who for many years has been living on the “hoop,” following her food source by seasonal migration. She attends the Ecosex Convergence ― an annual gathering of people who place their relationship with the earth above everything else ― and attends a workshop led by Reverend Teri Ciacchi, a sexologist, priestess of Aphrodite, and holistic spiritual healer in the Living Love Revolution Church.
In the style of Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Eula Biss, Surrender explores the outsider eco-cultures blossoming in the new American West in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers, and catastrophic wildfires.
Product details
- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: House of Anansi Press (April 7, 2020)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1487007248
- ISBN-13: 978-1487007249
- Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 7.9 inches
About the author
Joanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender , won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in May 2019. Blending memoir with reportage, criticism with nature writing, Surrender explores the changing landscape of the American West, inspired by a two-year stay in Montana. It will be published in Canada in 2019 and in the U.S. in 2020. Her writing has appeared in Dazed & Confused, Granta Online, The London Sunday Independent, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Orion Magazine, Tank, 3:AM and the Dark Mountain online edition. She teaches Prose Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction at the University of the Arts, London.